LETTERS FROM HOME: THE WINDMILLS AT THE CABIN ON THE CASTOR

May 31, 2001

Dear Patty,

DC's father is in an unwinnable war with the water lilies that choke the pond behind the cabin on the Castor. He climbs in a little skiff with a weed eater and lops off the heads of as many lilies as he can. He knows they'll grow right back, but still he persists. The best he can do is maintain a corridor in the pond wide and lengthy enough to cast a line. Inevitably he returns to the cabin with a bass or more.

DC's brother, Paul, likens him to Don Quixote tilting at water lily-shaped windmills.

Hank and Lucy seem to sleep with both eyes open at the cabin. We know they hear things we can't and are trying to protect us. The same happens at home, but a lot more things steal around at night in the wild, at least theoretically.

During one particularly restless night at the cabin, DC's brother, Paul, put Hank and Lucy into the cab of his Ford truck and drove it a few hundred yards down the lane out of earshot. There they spent the night fruitlessly howling no doubt at the wind.

Paul somehow slept through the nighttime turmoil last weekend. We didn't because they were in our room. Just as we fell asleep they sent up a raucous alarum of snarls and barks. We listened for the bobcat growl, the hatchet-wielding fiend that would merit such an outburst and heard nothing. When the deer or the raccoon began moving again, the barking resumed.

Thankfully, Hank and Lucy are becoming accustomed to some wild sounds. Hoot owls elicit only a few low woofs anymore. Hoot. Woof, they answer. Woof.

In the afternoon, Don Quixote's sleep-deprived daughter and I went looking for the two nasty copperheads that exhibited threatening body language when she and Paul hauled the johnboat down to the river that morning. They coiled and gave brother and sister a good scare. Paul has been copperhead-bit before and didn't volunteer for the snake-hunting mission.

The snakes were under a fallen tree disintegrating near the path to the boat and needed evicting. DC and I raked the rotting wood away but uncovered only a single baby snake that didn't look like a copperhead. I don't know whether the babies do look like adults. I do know they're just as deadly.

"Look!" DC shouted suddenly. After seven and a half years of marriage, I now know that "Look!" could mean a copperhead was bearing down on my backside or that it was snowing in May. The latter turned out to be the case.

On the small gravel bar just downstream from the boat, the air was swirling with butterflies, small ones with orange and black markings. We guessed the number to be 100 but it could have been many more. Busily quaffing nectar from the tiny purple blossoms, they seemed not to mind as we walked onto the bar and stood among them, reverently silent and grateful to have stumbled upon this vivid moment.

The Don's daughter is always reminding me what a dangerous and ravishing place the natural world is, often at the same time.

She is giving her father a pair of night-vision goggles for Father's Day.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.